Answering Back: Living poets reply to the poetry of the past

By Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy has invited fifty of her peers to choose and respond to a poem from the past. With up-and-coming poets alongside more established names, and original poems alongside the new works they have inspired – Paul Muldoon, Vickie Feaver and U. A. Fanthorpe, for example, engage with classic works by Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti – the result is a collection of voices that speak to one another across the centuries.

Teasing, subverting, arguing, echoing and – ultimately – illuminating, Answering Back is a vibrant, fascinating and timeless anthology, compiled by one of the nation’s favourite poets.

‘Intriguing . . . Entertaining and stimulating’ Good Book Guide

‘A starry game of call and answer across poetic generations’ FT Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 4, 2008
• ISBN: 9780330470575

Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children's Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 2009 to 2019. Her many collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. In 2021, she was awarded the international lifetime achievement award the Golden Wreath for her achievements in poetry.

Book preview

Answering Back

Also by Carol Ann Duffy

Standing Female Nude

Selling Manhattan

The Other Country

Mean Time

Penguin Selected Poems

The World’s Wife

Feminine Gospels

New Selected Poems

Rapture

FOR CHILDREN

Meeting Midnight

Rumpelstiltskin and Other Grimm Tales

The Skipping-Rope Snake

The Oldest Girl in the World

Underwater Farmyard

Moon Zoo

Queen Munch and Queen Nibble

The Stolen Childhood

Doris the Giant

The Good Child’s Guide to Rock ’n’ Roll

Collected Grimm Tales

Another Night Before Christmas

Beasts and Beauties

AS EDITOR

I Wouldn’t Thank You for a Valentine

Stopping for Death

Anvil New Poems

Time’s Tidings

Hand in Hand

Out of Fashion

Overheard on a Saltmarsh

Answering Back

Living poets reply to the poetry of the past

edited by CAROL ANN DUFFY

PICADOR

First published 2007 by Picador

This electronic edition published 2007 by Picador

an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

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Copyright © Carol Ann Duffy 2007

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For Simon Powell and Imtiaz Dharker with love

Contents

CAROL ANN DUFFY Foreword

WALTER DE LA MARE Echo

DANNIE ABSE Bluebells

EDWARD THOMAS Tall Nettles

GILLIAN CLARKE Nettles

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS The Red Wheelbarrow

IAN MCMILLAN The Green Wheelbarrow

PHILIP LARKIN This Be The Verse

CAROL RUMENS This Be The Verse (Philip Larkin)

DYLAN THOMAS In My Craft or Sullen Art

NINA CASSIAN My Last Book

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER Allegro

ROBIN ROBERTSON Ictus

DAFYDD AP GWILYM The Clock

MENNA ELFYN A Dream Against the Clock

WALLACE STEVENS Fabliau of Florida

SEAN O’BRIEN Grey Bayou

D. H. LAWRENCE Humming-Bird

PAUL MULDOON A Hummingbird

EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY Travel

ROGER MCGOUGH Quiet Zone

ALLEN GINSBERG from Howl

TONY CURTIS Trowel

WALT WHITMAN The Beasts

U. A. FANTHORPE A Word, Camerade . . .

W. H. AUDEN Musée des Beaux Arts

BILLY COLLINS Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited

LOUIS MACNEICE The Suicide

COLETTE BRYCE The Manager

THOMAS HARDY She Saw Him, She Said

ROY FISHER A Mellstock Fiddle

JOHN DONNE from Holy Sonnets

VERNON SCANNELL Another View of Thanatos

A. E. HOUSMAN from A Shropshire Lad

WENDY COPE Reading Housman

W. B. YEATS The Lake Isle of Innisfree

R. V. BAILEY On Leaving the Lake Isle of Innisfree

C. P. CAVAFY Ithaka

THEO DORGAN Ithaca

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS Labrador

RUTH PADEL Svalbard

RUMI Unfold Your Own Myth

IMTIAZ DHARKER Myth

ELIZABETH BISHOP Insomnia

RUTH FAINLIGHT Insomniac’s Moon

W. S. GILBERT The Captain’s Song (H.M.S. Pinafore)

JENNY JOSEPH The Worshipful Company of Moonwatchers

JOHN DONNE A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day

LIZ LOCHHEAD Midwinter Song

GIACOMO LEOPARDI To the Moon

JULIE O’CALLAGHAN Alla Luna

THOMAS HARDY The Voice

HENRY SHUKMAN The Call

SEXTUS PROPERTIUS Cynthia’s Ghost

JOHN HARTLEY WILLIAMS The Revenant

ANNA AKHMATOVA The Last Toast

ELAINE FEINSTEIN Another Toast

D. H. LAWRENCE To Women, As Far As I’m Concerned

JEAN SPRACKLAND Feelings

CHARLOTTE MEW On the Road to the Sea

JANE WEIR I’m Trying to Make Gnocchi di Patate for Angelina

JOHN DONNE Elegie: To his Mistress Going to Bed

OWEN SHEERS Elegy: To her Husband Going to Bed

PHILIP LARKIN Home Is So Sad

VICKI FEAVER Home is her Now

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI The One Certainty

JANE FEAVER Housekeeping

LUCILLE CLIFTON the lost baby poem

CLARE SHAW The No Baby Poem

YEHUDA AMICHAI Ibn Gabirol

DAVID HART Yehuda Amichai

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS Pied Beauty

MICHAEL WOODS A Bluebell from St Buenos’s

EUGENIO MONTALE Lemons

ROGER GARFITT Harebell

ANON Pangur Ban

MICHAEL SCHMIDT Pangur Bàn

EMILY DICKINSON ‘Grief is a Mouse’

PENELOPE SHUTTLE Grief x 2

PATRICK KAVANAGH The Hospital

PAUL HENRY The Waiting Room

ELIZABETH BISHOP One Art

PAULA MEEHAN Quitting the Bars

MURIEL RUKEYSER Poem

LINDA CHASE Waking

W. H. AUDEN Refugee Blues

ROBERT MINHINNICK The Yellow Palm

BEN JONSON Echo’s Song

CRAIG RAINE Marcel’s Fancy Dress Party

CESARE PAVESE ‘Death will come and will have your eyes . . .’

DENNIS O’DRISCOLL Towards A Cesare Pavese Title

RUDYARD KIPLING If

CAROL ANN DUFFY Kipling

Acknowledgements

Index of Poets

Index of Titles

Contributors’ biographies

Foreword

For this anthology, Answering Back, I invited the best of our contemporary poets to select a poem, or poem in translation, from a poet from the past which they would like to answer in some way. Around fifty of the poets responded. The choice of each poet is printed here alongside his or her own, new, answering poem. The reason for each individual choice was entirely up to the poets: some chose to subvert or to argue, some to play or to tease, some to echo or to transform, others to pay homage or to elegize. Throughout, there is a strong sense of the living and the dead poets’ belief in the triumph of language over time. As Gillian Clarke writes, ‘I want to say to the dead, look what a poet sings/ to life’. Poets, as Patrick Kavanagh wrote, must ‘snatch out of time the passionate transitory’. Time, for D. H. Lawrence, chosen by Paul Muldoon, is a long telescope.

One of the poets suggested that ‘Answering’ was a better title for the anthology; but I feel that Answering Back has more of the glint, the edge, that some of the new poems here display – U. A. Fanthorpe’s response to Walt Whitman being one; Carol Rumens’ to Larkin another. Other poems do, less combatively, respond to the initial call, uttering a gentler answering – Liz Lochhead to John Donne – the splash of a stone dropped in a deep well. Some of the new poems are confidently oblique. Some, my own response